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Friday, September 2, 2011

Hurricane Irene

Obviously this has nothing to do with nails, but it’s the reason why I’ve been away from this blog for so long. Living in Connecticut, we were hit by Hurricane Irene. Apparently when it hit my area, it was only considered a tropical storm. Ultimately, it still did quite a bit of damage. While flooding wasn’t a problem at my house or really with anyone I know, the winds that caused trees to collapse and wires to go down was certainly the worst of it.

We lost power for 4 days and I know a ton of people who currently still have no power, including half of our town. Our Internet was still down when I typed this (and a bunch of other upcoming posts) so I could get to posting as soon as the Internet was back up. Ultimately, we were internet/cable-less for just about a week. We are on the same grid as a shopping complex that has stores such as Walmart, Target, Kohls, Lowes, and Home Depot among others. Lowes and Home Depot were running generators, but all of the other stores had no power… including Walmart.

We had no damage done to our house or cars, so we were definitely lucky. I started classes during the time our power was out, so I had to shower at work before class. The worst parts were definitely not being able to flush the toilet without manually filling it with overflow from our well by carrying buckets of water from the basement to the bathroom, and not being able to have running water. We cooked on the grill, which also has a burner, so that wasn’t bad. We had a generator that allowed us to keep our fridge and freezer cold.

I just wanted to share some photos I took during and after the storm. All were taken on Sunday, the day we were hit.

This is just a small tree in our front yard getting blown about during the storm. I tried to get views of the tall trees blowing, but the photos did no justice to what was happening.

Our back deck covered in leaves.

The only casualty in our yard. It missed our shed.

This was right around the corner from our house. We live on a dead end, so the majority of our neighbors couldn’t get down the road. We would have still been able to if it weren’t for…

This. These are downed live wires on fire. They were on for 2.5-3 hours.

The end result of the downed wires. Burning and molten asphalt.

The culprit. Tree down, smoking/flaming utility pole near the tree, and wires snapped.

The awesome people in my fire department (who I volunteer for) takin’ care of the flaming asphalt. Kickin’ ass, guys!!

Boiling water in holes in the asphalt.

Even driving around today, nearly a week after the storm, there are still TONS of roads closed, downed lines, and trees on lines. I know other people had flooding problems they're still dealing with as well. And what's this I hear about Hurricane Katia? *sigh*